Faith and Miracles Guide
Faith: Faith is a pre-requisite to activating Wonders to produce Miracles. Faith, as required by Wonders, is measured based on the total island population. The faith formula is 1 priest converts/spreads faith to 6 island inhabitants. This action includes the priests' home town as well as citizens in other towns (see below). By looking at the wonder page of an island, one can see how many priests each player has, how much is the faith percent in his/her city population, and his/her island faith share. Faith does not have to reach 100% of the island population for the miracle to be activated. Miracles can be triggered when the total isalnd population faith reaches 20%, 40%, 60, 80%, and 100% according to the faith barometer level at the top of the wonder page. In an ideal world, every palyer will have one or more temples with high enough levels that allow recruiting priests to spread the faith to 100% of its town population i.e. 1 priest for every 6 citizens. However, this is alomst always not the case. There will be newbies on the island who need to research polytheism to have a temple, inactive players, players in vacation mode, and permanently banned player accounts pending deletion, and permanently banned player accounts who cannot be legally deleted as they contain ambrosia. Therefore, when a player manages to spread the faith to more than his share in her own town, that extra faith generated compensates for the lack of such at other towns In some islands with only 2 or 3 colonies, this can be truly the case where one strong player through spreading the faith to almost all of his conlony's population made up for the lack of faith in 2 samll colonies with very few citizens in them without temples or faith at all. And this was related by a player where her priests and faith level made for 24% of the total island population faith level, thus the miracle on that island was ready to be fired at the 20% faith barometer level Wonder: On the other hand the "Miracle Effect" depends on the "Wonder Upgrade Level" Miracles can be triggered at levels from 1 to 5 depending on the wonder upgrade level, and as described on the wonder's page A Wonder's upgrade level has nothing to do with faith level A Wonder's upgrade level determines the maximum size of the effect a miracle will invocate when it actaully gets activated The wonder gets upgraded by donating only non-island lux resources i.e. if you were on a crystal island, you can only donate sulfur, grapes, and marble (not wood, and not crystal) Therefore, even if the faith level reached 100% of the total population, the miracle will only fire with a maximum effect equal to the current wonder's upgrade level. Miracle Activation: Finally, when faith reaches at least 20% of the total island population, any player with a temple in a town on that island can activate the miracle from her temple on that island. The effect is empire-wide for that palyer i.e. it will reach all colonies of the player even those on other distant islands Just to be clear, when a player activates a miracle it does not affect neighbor players on the same island, let alone their colonies elsewhere If you don't have a temple, you're out of luck. If you have a temple and did not donate to the wonder or recruit priests and contribute to the total island faith, and did fire the mriacle from your temple you are a faith/wonder leecher. Get ready to be pillaged ;) You don't have to reach 100% faith to fire a miracle (100% faith means 1 priest for every 6 citizens on each and every colony on the island, or as otherwise compnesated by stronger players who can afford even 1 priest for every 5 or fewer citizens) Back to math. A 20% level faith barometer is good enough to activate the miracle at that faith level. Therefoe, 20% of 1/6th of the island population is enough. Let's give an example In an ideal world on an island with 6000 citizens, there should be 1000 priests to achieve 100% faith. However, only 20% of those 6000 is actually required to fire the miracle at 20% faith level Therefore, 6000 x 0.2 = 1200 faithful citizens are only required Divide this by 6 --> and the required number of priests is 200 only (which incidently is 20% of the original 1000 priests needed to reach 100% faith) So, to calculate a 600 citizen colony minimum share of faith (the goal is 100% by recruiting 100 priests) only 120 faithful citizens are required recurting only 20 priests. And so the general formula for the smallest number of priests required to achieve the mimum faith for colony is = (total colony population x 0.2) / 6 And the same goes for the island population as follows: smallest number of priests required to achieve the mimum faith for an island is = (total island population x 0.2) / 6 Now a real life example. Say island Z had 3 colonies A with a population of 600 and no temple or priests, B with a population of 1200 and 20 priests, and C with a population of 4200 and 180 priests The faith level of colony A is 0 The faith level of colony B is (20 x 6) / 1200 % = 10% The faith level of colony C is (180 x 6) / 4200 % = 25.7% The faith level of the island Z however is (20 x 6) + (180 x 6) / (600 + 1200 + 4800) = 1200 / 6000 = 0.2 (or 20%) Which is enough for player B and C to triger the miracle from their temples (player A does not have a temple) As can be seen, the 5.7% extra faith generated by colony C compensated for the total lack of faith in A and the lack of 10% faith in B. Hope this is not complicated as it looks Miracles can be fired by each and every player who have a temple on their island independently of each other. i.e. each one have their own triger and cool-off timer to be able to re-trigger the miracle again. Now imagine that you're a group of players on one island in one alliance, and you cooperate together to build faith and upgrade the wonder. If a miracle that helps attackers/pillagers was cooridnated during a pillage/attack where every player form your alliance fired the mriacle for themself at an agreed upon time, you ALL can have the miracle coverage for an extended time that would cover the duration of the attack and well beyond. The main idea of the new upgrade is to bring more "cooperation" and "coordination" and let the game bring more "social" interaction between players; more than what was going on in the earlier version. Even the new combat system stresses that in several ways as well (but that's another thread). The game does not force it, of course, but players will need to adapt with the new "ways" of playing ikariam if they want to succeed. I'm already seeing my tradeposts doing at least 3x-4x more trades than they did in the previous version, and I expect they'll do even more.